One of the readings in the colloquium on socialism last weekend was an excerpt from Bhaskar Sunkara, The Socialist Manifesto. In preparing my questions for discussion, I highlighted two sentences from his book. Here they are, along with the question I asked about each. On page 234, Sunkara writes, “The socialist record on oppression is uneven but still better than that of any other political tradition.” Is there any evidence from the 20th century we could look at to evaluate his claim? And: On page 236, Sunkara writes, “The socialist premise is clear: at their core people want dignity, respect, and a fair shot at a good life.” Do any other ideologies share this premise?   (0 COMMENTS)

Douglas Allen of Simon Fraser University has a working paper that builds on “Life-Years Lost: The Quantity and the Quality,” one of my blog posts from last year.  Most of his paper critiques other researchers’ cost-benefit analyses of COVID policy, but Allen spends a whole section applying my method to Canada: As of March 2021 the pandemic has lasted one year, which means that the average Canadian has lost two months of normal life. The population of Canada is about 37.7 million people, which means that 6.3 million years of life have been lost due to lockdown. The average age of reported Covid-19 deaths in Canada is about 80.42. In Canada an average 80 year old has a life expectancy of 9.79 years. This means that the 6.3 million years of lost life is equivalent to the deaths of 643,513 80 year olds. As of March 22, 2021 Canada has had a total of 22,716 deaths due to Covid-19. That amounts to 222,389 lost years of life. The question is, however, how many lost years of life would have resulted from Covid-19 deaths if there had been no lockdown? Consider two extremes: a. Assume that the number of Covid-19 deaths would have been 10% higher had there been no lockdown. Then Canada would have experienced an additional 2,271 deaths, which means there would have been additional 22,333 years of lost life due to Covid-19 deaths. The benefit of lockdown, therefore, was the avoidance of this extra 22,333 years of lost life. However, the cost of lockdown, as noted, was 6,300,000 years of lost life. The cost/benefit ratio of lockdown is 282 = 6,300,000/22,333. b. Assume that the initial ICL model forecasts were correct and without a lockdown Canada would have experienced 200,000 deaths. This would mean that Canada’s lockdown policies prevented 177,281 (200,000-22,716) deaths. Under the same age and life expectancy assumptions lockdown prevented the loss of 1,735,580 life years. The cost/benefit ratio of lockdown is 3.6 = 6,300,000/1,735,580. Case (b) is highly unrealistic and nothing close to this rate of death happened anywhere in the world. However, even in this extreme case, lockdown is a failure as a policy by cost/benefit standards. The review of the literature suggests that Case (a) is closer to reality. If lockdown only had a marginal effect on deaths, then by cost/benefit standards, lockdown has been a public policy disaster. Allen also reviews the basic empirics of COVID restrictions and COVID fatalities, and finds little connection.  Internationally, the correlation actually goes the wrong way.  His preferred explanation: Generally speaking, the ineffectiveness of lockdown stems from voluntary changes in behavior. Lockdown jurisdictions were not able to prevent non-compliance, and non-lockdown jurisdictions benefited from voluntary changes in behavior that mimicked lockdowns. The limited effectiveness of lockdowns explains why, after one year, the unconditional cumulative deaths per million, and the pattern of daily deaths per million, is not negatively correlated with the stringency of lockdown across countries. Theoretically plausible, but this implies that if we separately measured official COVID restrictions and unofficial COVID precaution, they would be negatively correlated.  As someone who spent about three months in Florida and Texas during the last year, this is hard to believe.  My observation is that the places with the least official restrictions were also the places with the least unofficial caution. Eventually, I suspect we’ll have excellent measures of all the relevant variables.  Researchers will be able to figure out what happened.  And neither the public, the media, nor policymakers will care.  Santayana squared. P.S. As I explained in the original post that inspired this section, my appeal to cost-benefit analysis is entirely in character with my Huemerian libertarianism: At this point, you could protest, “Hey Bryan, I thought you weren’t a utilitarian.”  So what if the cost of COVID prevention greatly exceeds the value of life saved?  My answer, to repeat, is that I have a strong moral presumption in favor of human liberty.  So while I respect individuals’ rights to overreact to moderate risks, I oppose any act of government that does not pass a cost-benefit test with flying colors. And no, I don’t think that an asymptomatic person who walks down the street unmasked is “aggressing” against passersby in any meaningful way.   (2 COMMENTS)

    President Biden has proposed raising the top federal tax rate on long-term capital gains from its current level of 20 percent to 39.6 percent. The rate would apply to people with income of $1 million a year or more. There are many good reasons to oppose an increase in the federal tax rate on capital gains. The capital gains tax taxes you on income you’ve already paid tax on, discourages capital formation, taxes capital gains that are due to inflation, and doesn’t raise as much revenue as a static analysis would predict. But California Democrats have an especially good reason, whatever their personal feelings and circumstances, to oppose an increase in the capital gains tax: it will generate less tax revenue for California’s state government and, therefore, less money for them to spend. These are the opening two paragraphs of David R. Henderson, “Capital Gains Tax Hike: No Gains, No Fairness,” Defining Ideas, May 6, 2021. Why should California Democrats be especially upset about an increase in the federal capital gains tax rate? Here’s why: Whereas the feds could tell themselves that they’re trading off higher rates with lower realizations, that doesn’t apply at the state level where the California capital gains tax rate remains unchanged at its current high level. The California government, more than most state governments, relies on high-income taxpayers for much of its revenue. It also taxes capital gains at the same rate as normal income. In California, therefore, the tax rate on capital gains for married people filing jointly is 9.3 percent for income between $117,269 and $599,016 and reaches a whopping 13.3 percent for income over $1,198,024. In recent years, the state government’s income from high-income Californians paying capital gains taxes has been huge. In 2018, for example, the latest year for which there are good data, Californians paid $15.17 billionin capital gains taxes. Total revenue collected that year was $133.33 billion. This means that 11.4 percent of total revenue was from capital gains taxes alone. Moreover, $13.02 billion of this was collected from taxpayers with an adjusted gross income of $1 million or more. That’s 85.8 percent of the total capital gains taxes paid and 9.8 percent of overall tax revenues. It’s too soon to tell what the data are for 2020 but the odds are that even more was collected in capital gains tax revenue. The fact that high-income Californians, the Californians who are targeted by President Biden’s tax proposal, pay so much has huge implications. It’s quite plausible, given past experience, that the higher capital gains tax rate would cause high-income people to cut their capital gains realizations by 40 percent or more. If that happened, and if high-income Californians acted like other high-income Americans, then the state government’s revenue from capital gains taxes would fall by 40 percent. If 2022, when the tax increase would presumably take place, were like 2018 in terms of percent of state revenue accounted for by capital gains taxes, then California’s state government revenue would be 3.9 percent lower than otherwise. Thanks to economist Justin Garosi of the California Legislative Analyst’s Office for steering me quickly to the revenue data. By the way, I also argue that the capital gains tax amounts to a fourth level of taxation on earned income. Read the whole thing. (0 COMMENTS)

Last week, the cooking website Epicurious announced via Twitter that they are “cutting out beef…this isn’t a vendetta against cows or people who eat them.  It’s a shift about sustainability; not anti-beef but pro-planet.” The standout response from someone (and I’m guessing here) who likes beef is, “I’m cutting out Epicurious…with a steak knife.” And so it goes.  I don’t know which is stranger: that meat has become so intensely partisan, or that, without fail, a stampede of dubious puns accompanies every discussion around it. First, let’s be honest: Epicurious is on a vendetta, having taken upon itself to decide what constitutes “pro-planet” foodstuffs.  Beef, safely enshrouded in the prevailing zeitgeist, was an easy target.  Regardless of complexities or facts to the contrary, cows have been skewered often and widely enough as “bad” that it makes the marginal marketing risks pretty low.  Any schoolkid can gigglingly lecture you about cow-farts and the atmosphere, making the “cutting out beef” stance a painless posture within the eco-woke establishment–virtue signaling without the tedious homework. Second, let’s be honest the other way ‘round, too: the kinds of people who grill up a 36-ounce Tomahawk Ribeye in righteous indignation are not the kinds of people who were likely to have downloaded a recipe for it in the first place. So what do we have here?  A side-skirmish in the culture wars?  It certainly helps folks decide which team they’re on, but it’s more than that.  It’s an example of the kind of inflammatory, reflex-inducing clickbait that dissuades any meaningful introspection. I suspect, for instance, that very few of the Epicurious in-crowd have spent a great deal of time either in a feed pen or on a kill floor.  Their finger-wagging therefore feels tendentious and arrogant.  In the same breath, however, I sincerely doubt if very many of the devoted carnivore set have either. And do you want to know why?  Because it’s a mess. Anyone who’s driven through Dalhart, Texas knows you can see the brown haze and smell the acrid stench from miles away—courtesy of the tens, perhaps hundreds, of thousands of feeder cattle penned in bare-dirt bunker yards.  It’s not exactly a “touristy” place and absolutely doesn’t resemble the bucolic pastures splashed on your average package of grocery store beef.  The meat we eat (and we eat more of it, though less of beef, than we have in a while*) doesn’t magically appear on our plates, and it’s darn tricky to sort out what the implications are.   For example, anyone who knows cattle will have a hard time agreeing with the PETA-folks that the animals in these feedlots are “miserable” or mistreated—I stand by a bet that if you threw open the gates to green pasture next door, the majority of Dalhart’s bovine denizens would be back by dusk, bellying up to their ration. And yet: visit the kill-line of the JBS Tolleson slaughter facility, and watch as the stunner-man, with his ceiling-mounted bolt gun does his once-a-second dirty work.  It’s not pretty—we have collectively outsourced the “honorable kill” our grandfathers used to do, to a minimum wage line worker and something moral is lost in the transaction.  Yet neither is a modern slaughter facility generally the hell-scape implied by the grainy, carefully edited, smuggled footage that is trotted out for propaganda purposes by the anti-meat (sorry—“pro-planet”) folks. This pro-planet thing, though: to adequately begin to address the “sustainability” concerns expressed by Epicurious would take approximately a million more words, but suffice it to say it’s also—yep—complicated.  Nothing is hinted at in the “cutting out beef” tweet that mentions the potential global implications of regenerative grazing, the massive gains to wildlife habitat from intensive agriculture, or the debatable science around bovine climate impacts.  To be fair, the website has a more cogent defense of its rationale here, but even in long-form it trivializes many of the major complexities surrounding beef production and consumption.  For instance, it repeats the oft-mistaken, nearly always misinterpreted “percent of greenhouse gas emissions” attributed to livestock–you can read anywhere from 14-25% depending on how radical the source.  Yet according to cooler heads, it’s closer to 3.3%, which pales in comparison, frankly, to the transportation and electricity generation sectors (56% in the U.S.).  If we are going to have a full and honest conversation about anthropogenic emissions, perhaps we should add automobile drivers and Epicurious’s web servers to the grab-bag of bugaboos.  Of the 2,358 “Beef” results on the Epicurious website, I’d say the one for caramelized onion steak-burgers might be the most enlightening. Nothing is free in this world, and no choices are without repercussions.  And in that sense, I honor Epicurious’s spirited, if perhaps vacuous position.  It matches the spirited and vacuous stance of the rest of us who imply that our meat-eating habits are somehow more “American” than the liberal elite are.  Yet there is nothing very “traditional” about eating your body-weight in meat (twice as much as our World War I great-grandfathers) and Epicurious, annoying as it might be, forces a reasonable question: how much is enough? Epicurious, obviously, is basically saying “zero,” which is both unrealistic and likely to be rife with unintended consequences. How many people, in the flurry of media attention have cooked up a Solidarity Steak?  I know I have. The Greek Epicurus, who is not getting any royalties for Epicurious’s heist of his name (non sum, non curo), was a founding philosopher of the school of being content with what you have—of “enoughism,” if you will.   So I’ll grant, it’s worth thinking about.  Deeply.  I wish I could write a morally conclusive piece here, showing persuasively that one side or the other is on the right side of the arc of history or whatever.  But I can’t, because there isn’t one.  My daughter is a vegetarian and going strong, and my only response when I’m teased about being the rancher whose kid won’t eat meat is: “I am large—I can contain contradictions.”  Perhaps the rest of us can too. Paul is Director of the Agrarian Freedom Project and is a PhD candidate in 16th Century New Spain at the University of Kansas. Paul holds a Master’s degree in Government from Harvard University and studied History and Science at the United States Air Force Academy.  (0 COMMENTS)

Whenever I have advocated a different Covid vaccine policy, people tell me that there was a risk that my ideas would lead to a loss of confidence among the public.  This never made sense to me.  Wouldn’t the public have more confidence in authorities if they told the truth and did what is best? More specifically, I advocated that the US adopt a “first-dose-first” policy, that we approve the Astra-Zeneca vaccine, and I opposed the halt in the Johnson & Johnson vaccine.  This is also the approach taken by the UK.  Despite this bold and honest approach, the UK seems to have far lower levels of vaccine hesitancy than other developed countries.  Or is it because of this bold and honest approach? You might wonder if the British people are different, less reluctant to take vaccines in general.  Not so: About 26 percent of Americans say they won’t take a vaccine, according to an April 21-26 CNN poll. Getting the pandemic under control in the US could be challenging without their buy-in. Meanwhile, in the United Kingdom vaccine hesitancy sits much lower; government polling shows it’s around 6 percent. This is not necessarily because the British are inherently more enthusiastic about vaccination. Last summer, a poll found that 75 percent of Americans and 71 percent of British people were open to taking a vaccine if one existed and was recommended by their government. The British public has good reason to trust their authorities on Covid vaccines, as they have mostly avoided game playing and instead dealt with vaccine issues in an honest and straightforward fashion: One of the tactics that distinguishes the UK from the US, and much of the world, is its approach to regulation and public communication in response to bad news about the vaccines. It’s an approach that could well have helped develop greater public trust in the vaccines. “In the UK, the medical communication has been pretty excellent,” David Comerford, an economist at the University of Stirling’s Behavioural Science Centre in the UK who researches vaccine hesitancy, told me. He focused particularly on how UK authorities reacted to and communicated about rare complications involving the vaccines that came out in news reports. The vaccine has become so popular in the UK that even the right wing populist press is strongly in favor, as this article from the Daily Mirror demonstrates: PS.  One wonders how things in America might have been different if the GOP had decided that the way to show loyalty to Trump was to encourage the use of the vaccine his administration championed, rather than to agree with his dubious theories of a stolen election. (0 COMMENTS)

The unemployment [rate] was expected to fall to 5.8% and the economy was predicted to add 978,000 jobs, but that didn’t happen despite mass vaccinations and government stimulus…. not by a long shot. So writes Matt Margolis in “Biden Bust: Unemployment Rate Up, Numbers ‘Way Worse Than Expected,” Inflation May Be Coming,” PJ Media, May 7, 2021. No, no, no! The increase did not happen despite the Biden “stimulus” bill; it happened in large part because of the bill, which was not mainly about stimulus. When the federal government pays people an extra $300 a week to be unemployed, a few million people who would have take the many jobs available will instead take a summer holiday. Here’s what I wrote in “An Unnecessary ‘Stimulus’“, Defining Ideas, March 5, 2021: Of course, what we would really like to know is the effect of the double whammy of extending unemployment benefits through August and increasing them by $400 per week. The latter measure would cause millions of unemployed people to make more money by being unemployed than by being employed. My own admittedly intuitive guess is that if the bill passes with those benefits, at least two million workers who would have been working will be out of work. That one provision of the “stimulus” bill, in short, would create a drag on the economy. (By the way, I got the $400 wrong; it’s “only” $300.) Later, co-blogger Scott Sumner made the same point here and cited the same study here that I had cited in my March article. There shouldn’t have been much a surprise at all. And remember that the reason was Biden’s $1.9 trillion bill. So no, not despite but because of. UPDATE: The governors of Montana and South Carolina have stated that because the $300 per week extra federal unemployment benefit is discouraging people from working, they will end the benefit next month. (0 COMMENTS)

It was my singular good fortune to serve as the editor for the April 2021 Liberty Matters forum, “Meanings of Liberty: Aron, Constant, Berlin.” What is liberty, and what does it mean (to each of these thinkers)? This, in essence, is the question that April lead essayist Daniel B. Klein and two respondents, Daniel J. Mahoney and Helena Rosenblatt, set out to explore in this particular edition of Liberty Matters. (If you are not yet familiar with the Liberty Matters series, no worries: each month at the Online Library of Liberty we feature a fresh collection of essays and responses on a different topic pertaining to the idea of liberty.) Now that last month’s conversation has come to an end, I hope in this response to draw some additional attention to a few elements of the exchange that I took to be significant. Klein’s lead essay offers a valuable reminder that liberty has no single meaning: the term is polysemous, subject to multiple interpretations. This is a descriptive fact and one that we know to be true from everyday life; I know I certainly do, working for an organization called “Liberty Fund.” Often my colleagues and I are queried by acquaintances, what does your organization mean by “liberty”? What is the content of that particular value or principle or idea? Well, as this month’s exchange demonstrates, the answer is, “It depends.” Fortunately, even as it opens the mind to the plurality of meanings attributable to the word “liberty,” Klein’s essay grounds us again in the definitions and thoughts about liberty given by the forum’s titular thinkers, Raymond Aron, Benjamin Constant, and Isaiah Berlin. This move is one of the forum’s most important: per Klein, we can talk about differing meanings of liberty and recognize that there are indeed several, without throwing up our hands and saying that any attempt to define liberty is futile, necessarily contested, and therefore pointless. Klein insists that we don’t have to capitulate much at all to the multiplicity of meanings for this important word: he is adamant in his defense throughout the forum of the “classical liberal spine” of the idea of liberty, that one should be free from attempts to mess with one’s stuff (considering “stuff” in the one of the broadest possible ways, drawing from the Latin idea of suum). If you are tempted to scoff and say, “Pshh! Stuff is just stuff! Surely liberty must have a meaning beyond the material!” Then I very much hope you will read Dan’s essay, and particularly his reply to Professor Rosenblatt, as I think it is there that he zeroes in most clearly on why “stuff” is inescapably central to the effort of defining what liberty means in concrete terms. One of the beautiful things for me about facilitating this exchange—which I could not have done without my wonderful colleagues here at Liberty Fund, especially Thea Burress—was seeing another classical liberal “promise” come true before my eyes once again: open discussion catalyzed productive debate and the genuine spontaneous exchange of very different, even opposed ideas. Klein’s thesis, which I admire and appreciate, was contested and qualified in several ways across multiple essays by Dan Mahoney and Helena Rosenblatt, and I was able to appreciate the central contentions of those rejoinders and responses as well. Again, this is not to say that everyone is equally correct, in some final sense. That is for readers to decide for themselves, after having considered all the major points of the dialogue set forth in the forum. Rather, I am simply appreciating that in this exchange, we can find thought-provoking examples of cordial, productive engagement across philosophical and intellectual demarcations of difference. To me this is genuinely hopeful, as it reminds that we have lots to learn from one another, even when we ourselves are very smart and capable and serious about what we’re saying, as both Dans and Helena all most certainly are. So why should you or anyone else care about this lively debate over the meaning of “liberty”? As Dan Mahoney addresses across his remarks, there is much confusion in the modern liberal west about the meaning of “individual liberty” and the general sentiment of “to each her own.” Does faithful adherence to these concepts (most seriously the former, as it’s one of the Declaration-keystone values for the American nation) mean that we can’t criticize others for how they live their lives, no matter what they do? Put another way, one question we face in our societies today is whether liberty and freedom are essentially unlimited and all-encompassing, allowing us to do pretty much whatever it is we want to do, or whether liberty implies or necessitates certain limits on our actions and appetites, self-or-other-imposed. If “unchecked” liberty has led to a wasteland of social and cultural license, as the strongest socially conservative critiques of our society today would suggest, does “saving” liberty require the imposition of “enlightened” limits or the mandate of “ennobling” practices? This illuminates a fascinating web of questions to which there are no easy answers or neat solutions: Mahoney might wish to see more people pursue elevated ideals of liberty, but he knows as well as anyone (particularly as a scholar of Solzhenitsyn) that attempts to coerce or even encourage adherence to “higher” practices or “ennobling” liberties can quite plausibly lead to a form of tyranny, ironically serving as great justifications for a simpler definition of the term, closer to “negative liberty” in the Berlinian sense—freedom from compulsory participation in or support of any project one wishes not to take part in. This minimal formulation may seem insufficient, under present conditions, but I suggest it may seem more attractive if agents of the state were to arrive to interfere with your suum on account of your failing to follow whatever practices some official program of “positive” liberty might require. To be clear, the regime aimed at positive liberty I have just described does not feature in Dan Mahoney’s position: “To recognize these essential distinctions between higher and lower ways of life does not mean that political authorities should criminalize most expressions of moral vice and thus aim at an implausible and undesirable moral and political perfectionism.” His point instead is that “a choice for limited government need not entail the societal inculcation of moral relativism or radical subjectivism.” Presumably this means the state could take a more active role in endorsing, pointing out, or encouraging some “higher” ways of living, while clearly labeling, if still refusing to go out of its way to interrupt, some of the “lower” ways. This may be true, but any such project must be undertaken with care. Even in the absence of official requirements, states tend to struggle with “suggestions,” particularly in the realm of the higher things. Perhaps this is one reason why Americans of the early republic thought it wise, by and large, to dispense with state-sponsored religious establishments before the midpoint of the nineteenth century. As our predecessors discovered, even if an establishment is not coercive or bad, it crowds out attention and recognition for other sects (in our case, other ideas of “higher liberty”) and denies them a fair and level marketplace in which to compete for followers and adherents on the merits. There are other possibilities, too: what if the “highest” liberties are most realized when denied state support and left simply to attest to themselves in the zone of civil society, under the protections of negative liberty? All of this being said, there is no quibbling with Mahoney that, when every man is left “free” to define good and evil for himself, and then to act on those definitions, no good will come of that. So while we can’t do much to enshrine in law even basic programs of higher liberty, we most certainly can speak up for and defend the commonsense core of our “traditional” moral inheritance, which I think helpfully demarcates the boundaries of the negative liberty space where we should be free to operate. In other words: we need to keep teaching our children that it’s not okay to lie, steal, cheat, molest, harm, or abuse others, and that others have a significant moral worth that merits our respect—both personally and when we act together politically through government. Within these guardrails, we preserve a space for responsible liberty, a freedom that understands it is not free to simply write at will over the world and its other inhabitants. Pluralism, when it flourishes in a culture that can understand and sustain it, allows all sorts of different practices to develop. People of all kinds are then free to observe and consider these practices and the communities they come from. From there people can make informed choices about what kinds of people and groups they wish to associate with—about how to use their liberty. Critically, people make choices for themselves concerning what is high and admirable and worthy of emulation or adoption, versus what is low and ignoble and deserving of rejection, if not concerted opposition. Free civil society is the space in which this all happens. We live in a time, however, when the professed values of various prominent political and social groups conflict in significant ways, especially if we ask their respective adherents. Some agitate for social justice while others unabashedly rally behind flag and nation. Upon reflection, I am actually less inclined to grant members of any such adversarial group their common claim, that they and their political foes’ values are so distinct. I do not think certain values are in conflict so much as certain people are in conflict under the banner of their values and within the psychological context of their imagined tribes. Black Lives Matter and Make America Great Again activists both believe in, and publicly practice, certain ideas of community, solidarity, and political involvement that are not so dissimilar as their mutually-scathing rhetorical exchanges would suggest. The problem is that both of these groups have taken steps to limit the extent of their solidarity, and the bounds of their community; neither group can believe that a member of the other might have their best interest truly at heart, or even goodwill in their hearts. They are each other’s others. Under such conditions, of course politics will become an exercise in mutual abuse and vexation. Of course genuine liberty—the freedom to be as one is and desires to be—will be imperiled. Pressures to take sides and to conform to group expectations abound. And yet, figures as self-consciously different as Ibram X. Kendi and Donald J. Trump continue to appeal to ideas of freedom and of liberty before their respective audiences. BLM marchers and MAGA rally attendees are perhaps equally dismayed by what they perceive to be threats to their liberty (closely connected to their lives and their sense of justice). Suum is at stake, the freedom to be oneself absent police aggression and racism (BLM) or big-government intervention (MAGA). Everyone thinks that liberty is vitally important, and that the nation—or a cherished subset of it—is on the brink of losing it. Yet stepping back and considering this forum, I think it is clearer to me than ever before how common are these fears and their underlying motivations. Liberty is a value of shared concern, but too many groups identify another group (of their fellow citizens!) as the main threat to the realization of liberty, and so the conditions that liberty requires (some deference toward the different attitudes, behaviors, and preferences of others; an unwillingness to use the state to coerce desired acts) continue to be undermined. In times ahead I know I will be thinking more about how we might refashion a banner of liberty that could unite, rather than serve to further inflame and divide, the aforementioned groups, as well as others that are similarly prone to deep and at times destabilizing disagreement. I am grateful to have the April Liberty Matters essays from Dan Klein, Helena Rosenblatt, and Dan Mahoney in my mind as I consider ways to do this. I am reminded at this junction of an observation from Wittgenstein that, “Language is a framework to structure disagreement.” How well this pairs with Klein’s summation, “Liberalism is, in spirit, about learning to expect, live with, even enjoy the disagreement. Death, taxes, inflation, the nation-state, and higher-things disagreement are five things we must get used to and work to make less bad than they otherwise would be.” Yes indeed. Liberty will remain a contested concept. But there is also a hope that, in our social and political life, we will discover more productive ways to channel and to harmonize our clearly shared concerns about core components of liberty, so that we might spend more time enjoying our liberty together, instead of eyeing one another suspiciously, fearing that because of them liberty is about to end. It is not, so long as we can contain our mutual distrust and contempt, and articulate together those shareable goods of freedom we all wish to enjoy. (0 COMMENTS)

I posted on May 3 about G. A. Cohen’s use of a camping analogy to make the case for socialism. Here’s another quote from Cohen’s Why Not Socialism? A nonmarket cooperator relishes cooperation itself: what I want, as a non-marketeer, is that we serve each other; and when I serve, instead of trying to get whatever I can get, I do not regard my action as, all things considered, a sacrifice. To be sure, I serve you in the expectation that (if you are able to) you will also serve me. My commitment to socialist community does not require me to be a sucker who serves you regardless of whether (if you are able to do so) you are going to serve me, but I nevertheless find value in both parts of the conjunction–I serve you and you serve me–and in that conjunction itself: I do not regard the first part–I serve you–as simply a means to my real end, which is that you serve me. The relationship between us under communal reciprocity is not the market-instrumental one in which I give because I get, but the noninstrumental one in which I give because you need, or want, and in which I expect a comparable generosity from you. (Pp. 42-43, italics in original.) This raises so many questions: #1. Is this clearly distinct from a market relationship? #2. Is it possible that people in market relationships enjoy serving others? #3. Cohen says that he would be a sucker if he served without getting anything back. His only apparent exception is if the person is unable to give back. Does Cohen realize how close he’s coming to an insistence on a market-type relationship?       (0 COMMENTS)

A couple of weeks ago, I was interviewed by John Batchelor of CBS Radio on Romney’s child allowance proposal. It’s here. It runs about 10 minutes. (0 COMMENTS)

Part 2 of 2. Read Part 1 here. The  revisionist view referenced previously stands as interpretive history, but it emanates from a very different view of the role of regulation and markets in electricity. It not only brings into focus the question of “Why Regulate Utilities?” (Harold Demsetz) but Why Regulate Electricity? Electricity is different, PUCT/ERCOT proponents contend. Its physical properties require large areas under coordinated control. And to have a competitive market, central control must be external to the firm and economically managed. To avoid operational chaos, which would make blackouts the norm, this “commons” requires design principles for coordination and efficiency. Elinor Ostrom, in this sense, supplements or corrects the central-planning challenge posed by Ludwig von Mises and F. A. Hayek. Central planning by PUCT/ERCOT reflects government intervention to transplant competition into what hitherto was a monopoly situation of franchised-protected utilities generating, transmitting, and distributing electricity. The mandatory open access model of a “network industry” allows retail rivalry where the utility is legally required to open up its transmission to competing suppliers to reach final users. PUCT/ERCOT’s control of the grid is ipso facto central planning for access and price, as retailers come in with their own electricity to sell. The “non-tragedy of the commons.” Competition in place of monopoly. Decentralized central planning. Texas, in fact, having “an institutional design whose transparent rules enabled decentralized coordination,”[1] was held up to be the national ideal. “The economic vision that informed Texas’s electricity restructuring was grounded in one simple, yet powerful idea,” stated two proponents. “Market processes and competition do a better job than political processes in harnessing private knowledge to reduce long-run costs, increase consumer choice and encourage innovation.”[2] Free Market Alternative The Federal Power Act of 1935, Public Utility Holding Company Act of 1935, Public Utility Regulatory Practices Act of 1978, Energy Policy Act of 1992, Texas Public Utility Regulatory Act of 1975, Texas Public Utility Regulatory Act of 1995, Texas Electric Restructuring Act of 1999…. The Federal Energy Regulatory Commission (né Federal Power Commission), Security and Exchange Commission, Public Utility Commission of Texas, Electric Reliability Council of Texas, North American Electric Reliability Corporation, National Association of Regulatory Utility Commissioners…. The above whirlwind of laws and agencies serves as the foreword and afterword of the Great Texas Electrical Blackout of February 2021. A true free market-based on private property rights and voluntary exchange requires repealing or at least amending the above laws, as well as terminating or demoting the above agencies. At the moment of production/transmission/distribution; upstream, midstream, downstream; wholesale or retail, natural gas and electricity would be guided by entrepreneurs, not experts, regulators, and planners. Explained another way, this reform agenda would remove: *Franchise protection *Rate regulation *Transmission access edicts *Entry or exit mandates *Industry-structure limitations Conclusion Interpreting and learning from the Great Texas Blackout brings much of the classical liberal worldview into play. Such concepts as undesigned versus imposed order, seen versus unseen, the unintended consequences of government intervention, and regulation as a cumulative process come to the fore. Particular vigilance is required to separate “contrived,” “managed,” or “market-conforming” markets from the real thing. Terms such as functional planning, decentralized planning, and decentralized coordination suggest a middle way between the free market and central planning. But as Don Lavoie warned, “relatively modest” and “noncomprehensive planning” is still planning, defined as “policy measures that involve concentrating power to shape the economy in a special government agency.”[3] Similarly, mandatory transmission access is not “deregulation” or “free market” because it introduces “competition” to electricity. Private property rights are a prerequisite to a free market. Without clear definitions, what is government and what is not becomes hopelessly confused.[4] “The Nature of the Firm” comes into play with the importance of cooperation, not only competition. Economies of scale and scope, vertical/horizontal integration, and price signals are how firms in a free market address the coordination problem. Forced disintegration complicates coordination (per Oliver Williamson), as does low-to-negative pricing from government-enabled competition. And in a highly regulated system, what is not commanded is discretionary, particularly if it is deemed unaffordable (as in weatherization). In terms of public policy, true electricity deregulation, demoting today’s central-planning approach, represents is-versus-ought and ideas-have-consequences. Let the debate continue. [1] L. Lynne Kiesling and Andrew Kleit, introduction to Electricity Restructuring: The Texas Story, ed. Kiesling and Kleit (Washington, DC: AEI Press, 2009), p. 2. [2] Ibid, p. 8. [3] Don Lavoie, National Economic Planning: What is Left? (Cambridge, MA: Ballinger Publishing, 1985), pp. 3, 2. He adds (p. 3): “All advocates of planning seem desperately to want comprehensiveness and rely profoundly upon its rhetorical appeal.” [4] Consider this confused statement from a February 19, 2021, Texas Tribune story: “Policy observers blamed the power system failure on the legislators and state agencies who they say did not properly heed the warnings of previous storms or account for more extreme weather events warned of by climate scientists. Instead, Texas prioritized the free market.” Robert L. Bradley is the founder and CEO of the Institute for Energy Research. (0 COMMENTS)